[Significantly, there is no such sign in English. Not only is Afghanistan restoring its most emblematic building, it is doing so entirely by itself. Funding is Afghan, and so are its architects, engineers and workers — even its technical advisers. Moreover, a surprising percentage of the professional staff are women, 25 percent, despite the lack of any gender quotas imposed by international donors — of which there are none.]
By Rod Nordland
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Darulaman Palace on the
southern outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2015,
before the beginning of
the reconstruction. Credit Jim Huylebroek
for The New York Times
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KABUL,
Afghanistan — Nothing
symbolizes the wrack and ruin of Afghanistan and its four decades of war better
than Darulaman Palace, a once-magnificent edifice visible on its hillock perch
for miles around.
The palace has been pummeled and pockmarked
by every conceivable caliber of weapon fired by nearly every faction in the
country’s recent wars, with the possible exception of the Americans and their
allies, because it was too damaged by the time they arrived to provide much
useful cover.
Yet, like Afghanistan itself, the palace
never quite totally collapsed, its four domed towers still in place, although
the building beneath was so ruined it seemingly defied gravity.
Now much of Darulaman Palace is obscured
behind scaffolding and green netting, its mangled trusses and battered
Corinthian columns visible only in snatches. Huge lettering hangs from the
scaffolds, in Dari and Pashto, reading, “We Can Do It.”
Significantly, there is no such sign in English.
Not only is Afghanistan restoring its most emblematic building, it is doing so
entirely by itself. Funding is Afghan, and so are its architects, engineers and
workers — even its technical advisers. Moreover, a surprising percentage of the
professional staff are women, 25 percent, despite the lack of any gender quotas
imposed by international donors — of which there are none.
The price tag, too, is Afghan: $20 million
has been budgeted for the four-year project to rebuild the three-story,
107-foot-high palace. A few years ago, according to Omara Khan Masoudi, the
former head of the National Museum, the United States carried out a feasibility
study that calculated a $200 million cost for rebuilding the 150-room building,
using foreign contractors, and the idea was rejected as impossibly costly.
When the project first got underway in 2016,
according to Nilofar Langar, spokeswoman for the ministry of urban development,
the first job was cleaning 600 tons of debris from the vast building,
everything from human and animal waste to bullet and artillery casings. A
foreign company bid $1 million to do the initial cleanup; a gang of Afghan
laborers, led by women employed by the ministry, did it for $30,000, Ms. Langar
said. “We saved $970,000.”
President Ashraf Ghani has championed the
project as an exercise in national pride, visiting the site three times to
check on its progress. He has pointedly refused any international help —
although some donors may well note that because they underwrite most of Afghanistan’s
budget, it is arguably international money in the end.
The idea to restore the palace has been one
of Mr. Ghani’s most popular initiatives. In a fractious coalition government
that took two years to agree on a defense minister, the Darulaman project has
enjoyed an unusual level of multipartisan support.
“I’m very happy to see the president pay
attention to the reconstruction of this palace,” Mr. Masoudi said. “It’s really
important. The media now is celebrating this as the land of terrorism, Al Qaeda
and Taliban. This is something different.”
The goal is to get the palace ready for the
centenary of Afghanistan’s independence from Britain in 1919. Darulaman Palace
is a lot more than an unpretty face, a result of its last four dissolute
decades: It encompasses the sweep of almost nine decades of Afghan history.
The palace never actually served as a palace,
for any king or head of state. King Amanullah, who ordered its construction,
was deposed before it was finished, by a revolt led by conservative mullahs
against his modernizing rule in 1929. (He introduced girls’ schools and
discouraged the wearing of burqas, among other efforts not seen again for a
half-century.)
Designed by French and German architects,
mixing neoclassical European styles with Moghul and Eastern influences, the
palace was not only possibly Afghanistan’s biggest building, it was also one of
its first to get central heating and running water.
In the years to come, it was everything but
what it had been built to be, serving as the medical school for Kabul
University, a warehouse for raisins (a lot of raisins), the seat of various
ministries and finally the Ministry of Defense.
It burned down and was rebuilt by King
Mohammad Zahir Shah in the 1960s. During the civil war years of the 1980s and
1990s it became a base for various mujahedeen factions, was set afire again by
the Taliban, then became a refugee settlement and a nomad camp (with goats
residing in the grandiose Oval Room). In the last decade it was a battalion
headquarters for the Afghan National Army.
During those decades of civil conflict, it
was much prized for its massive walls and commanding position on a hill
controlling approaches to the city from the south. The consequences are only
too evident.
In just one typical square yard of wall on
the northeast tower, for instance, it is possible to count 105 bullet, shrapnel
and artillery holes. That wall is about 150 square yards in area, and it is one
of four such walls on each of four towers, all of which are dwarfed by the rest
of the palace’s expanse, and most of which is similarly perforated.
Do the math: An estimate in the millions of
holes would not be unreasonable. “If there’s one thing you can’t count in
Afghanistan, it’s war and bullet fire,” said Zabihullah Rahimi, the deputy site
manager. “No one can count the bullet holes, they’re countless.”
Even interior rooms are shot full of holes,
and covered in graffiti by various factions, in an assortment of dialects and
alphabets. In one such room, the reconstruction project’s professional staff
members work at banks of laptops as they monitor the state of the work, which
at the moment mostly consists of stripping off several square miles of plaster
and concrete from brick walls and pillars, entirely with hand picks and hammers.
Masouma Delijam, 28, a senior architect on
the project, went from a job for a private contractor to her job here for the
Afghan government, at half the pay. “We are all very proud to be part of this,”
she said. “Our salary is not much, but it is worth it to be part of this
project.”
That is especially true, she said, because it
is being done by Afghans themselves. “It is so good that we have been able to
find the capacity in ourselves for this,” she said.
That should come as no surprise, said Ajmal
Maiwandi, head of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which provides technical
advice on the project (from its Afghan experts). “It’s been more than a decade
and a half. If the capacity doesn’t exist to deal with a project of this
nature, it would be surprising all around.”
For Ms. Delijam’s entire life, the ruined
Darulaman Palace was a reminder of what had become of the country. “It affected
us, we saw it every day, and now people will see us rebuilding it, and they
will get hopeful about the future of Afghanistan.”
Not everything is rosy about the project’s
future. Some of the laborers complained they had not been paid their
$150-a-month salaries in four months.
“I admit there was a delay,” said Ms. Langar,
attributing it to administrative problems, not financial ones, and vowing that
all salaries will soon be up-to-date. She also said the project was already a
year behind schedule, though there is still hope of making it in time for the
centenary.
Cost overruns and repeated delays have long
been a feature of Afghanistan’s many foreign-run projects, sometimes with
disastrous results (the Kajaki Dam is still unfinished after a
half-billion-dollar American investment). This time, Ms. Delijam said, Afghans
will have no one to blame — or to thank — but themselves.